After making national TV, Dota 2 and iG make it onto China’s biggest sports newspaper as well!

iG winning The International 2 has stirred quite a bit of excitement in the international eSports scene, and after they made it onto CCTV, now China’s biggest sports paper, TITAN DAILY has coverage of them too.

Translation of article: Beijing time September 3 2012, 11:30AM, at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall the second iteration of the Dota2 International competition’s Grand Finals began: Ukraine’s Team NaVi versus China’s Team iG. Over the next three hours of fierce fighting, iG defeated NaVi by a score of 3 to 1 to win the championship, and a record-breaking 1 million US dollars grand prize.

In 2011, the first Dota2 International had already set the record for prize money. Last year, NaVi won the championship, and Chinese team EHOME sadly placed second.

This year, of 16 of the world’s top Dota2 teams, 5 hailed from China, and over 7 days of competition a Chinese team successfully took the top place, with all 5 Chinese teams making it into the top 8, thus defending China’s glory and honor in this competition.

IG’s star player Zhou had this to say: “In Dota, China is best in the world, and Dota2 is merely an upgrade of Dota, so we face our matches with only one idea, that is to defend China’s reputation and place at the top of the world.”

Over the course of the competition, as long as a match was a non-Chinese team versus a Chinese team, the crowd in Benaroya Hall would gravitate towards automatically supporting the non-Chinese team. “Competing in foreign countries, I feel like we’re playing against the world, the good thing is that we were successful!” another of iG’s stars, YYF, described.

Electronic sports in China has more than ten years of history and development now, and Dota is currently China’s most popular game as well as the game in which Chinese players are strongest. In addition, there is Starcraft, Warcraft, Counterstrike, and FIFA, etc.